Re-imagining difference in the pedagogical encounter

Abstract

The pedagogical encounter has been a site of robust theorization in curriculum studies. For critical curriculum scholars, pedagogy is commonly understood as a site of individual and social transformation. The articles in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry question whether the pedagogical encounter is always a catalyst of desired change. Drawing from Gaztambide-Fern andez and Arr aiz Matute’s (2013) threefold theorization, we view pedagogy as always intentional, always relational, and moved by an ethical imperative. The four articles dive deeper into the ethical and relational dimensions of pedagogy by presenting us with new ways of thinking about “Self,” “Other,” and the politics of differentiating between “familiar and strange others” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 24). As Sara Ahmed (2000) argues, the self-other relationship is determined at the moment of the encounter and involves techniques for “seeing the difference.” Those techniques also operate to differentiate between “familiar and strange others” in ways that produce a “visual economy” (p. 24). The authors in this issue illustrate the multiple ways the visual economy operates within the pedagogical encounter(s); this economy, at times, conditions teachers and learners to “see difference” in oppressive ways. Collectively, these authors explore how the visual economy constrains or limits how we see, engage, and teach about difference, as well as how the pedagogical encounter produces others as strangers. At the same time, these authors also show us that once these techniques of differentiation are identified, deconstructed, and critiqued, new and liberatory ways of seeing and producing difference are made possible, and can, in fact, nurture more ethical relationalities. In the first article of this issue, Sun Young Lee makes an important intervention into the taken-for-granted practices of observation in the context of teacher education. In her article titled “Seeing the Difference: Anticipatory Reasoning of Observation and its Double Gesture in Teacher Education,” Lee examines the way teachers learn to see and think about the development of children and teachers through the lens of difference. As a supposedly empirical or scientific practice, methods of observation and feedback are integral to teacher education programs (Copland, 2010). Yet, as Lee argues, practices of observation reflect social and cultural values and are embedded within particular historical contexts. Building on the work of Peter Galison (2014), Lee illustrates the role that the visual plays in the production of knowledge and constitution of difference. As Lee argues, we do not naturally see diversity; rather, the process of visualization produces categories of difference that reify racial hierarchies. As